Beating the Mafia at their own game: After years of paying a ‘protection’ tax, Palermo businesses came together to fight back

Palermo, Italy, businesses pledge not to pay 'pizzo' to Mafia

A wide, shaded downtown piazza is jammed with diners savouring oddly rustic looking food as plates are hustled through large wooden doors set in the stone façade of a restaurant older than Italy itself.

Despite its Old World charm, local delicacies and being owned for five generations by the same genial family, Antica Focacceria San Francesco is best known these days for its owners’ defiance of the Mafia in a city where organized crime has a suffocating presence.

Here, Fabio Conticello, one of two brothers who run Antica, is reluctant to talk — not out of fear, he is largely over that — but because he is so busy. Wiping his hands on his apron, he settles one customer’s bill, directs a waiter to a table needing attention and only then pauses to talk.

“It has not always been easy but we believe this is the right way. It is an important thing to do,” Mr. Conticello says in a soft voice.

The Conticellos are among a growing number of businesses in Palermo and elsewhere in Italy that have publicly pledged not to pay “pizzo” — the expected “protection” money extorted by the Mafia.

On the windows of his restaurant, beside the notices of awards and which credit cards are accepted, is an orange circle around an X, bisected by black letters: “Addiopizzo.”

It is the logo of a grassroots anti-Mafia campaign causing a sensation here, igniting a once unimaginable crusade of community activism challenging the omnipotence of the crime cartels that have held some sovereignty over this island since before the founders of the Antica had learned to cook.

Addiopizzo, which means “goodbye pizzo,” represents a bold declaration, a solemn promise and a hope for the future.

Pizzo is an illicit tax imposed by the mob on businesses in a gangster’s territory and has been a constant money-maker for Cosa Nostra, the proper name of the Mafia born on the island of Sicily.

The word pizzo is Sicilian dialect for a bird’s beak. The image of a bird moving from flower to flower sipping nectar from each conjured its use for the protection racket, where shops are intimidated into paying a monthly fee to be left alone.

The name — and the extortion — have spread, throughout Italy and Europe and to North America. In Canada, businesses in Montreal, Toronto, York Region, Hamilton and St. Catharines face demands to pay pizzo to the local Mafia.

What is it about Palermo that paying pizzo to the Mafia is normal?

Official estimates say 80% of Palermo’s businesses routinely paid pizzo and the power of the Mafia here has long meant it could not be challenged.

It was in that climate that seven young friends in Palermo dreamed of starting a pub. One of them drafted a business plan, estimating expenses; alongside rent and wages, was pizzo.

“It was a provocation, of course, and it got them really thinking,” says Edoardo Zaffuto, a spokesman for Addiopizzo. “What is it about Palermo that paying pizzo to the Mafia is normal? It was a problem. One day they would come, they would knock on our door. What are we going to do when — not if, when — they come,” he says of the 2004 pub planning.

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Aggrieved that doing business here required such dark calculus, the group printed large stickers. Designed to mimic the look of traditional Sicilian obituary notices, they bore one sentence: “An entire people that pays pizzo is a people without dignity.”

Residents woke on June 29, 2004, to find the stickers plastered in the city’s core. The slogan suggested the death of their dignity for accepting the system of pizzo.

The insult hit harder than they imagined.

Calogero Ferrara, deputy prosecutor in Palermo’s busy Antimafia directorate, remembers the day he saw the stickers along the cluttered streets near his office in the magnificently imposing courthouse.

“It appeared so surprising that at the beginning, we thought it was some kind of Mafia message,” Mr. Ferrara says.

Authorities quickly welcomed the defiant act. When the group were out putting up stickers on a second night, a police squad stopped them. When the officers heard what they were really doing, they were encouraged to continue.

“Little by little, we grew,” Mr. Zaffuto says. “We started a website and created an email account. The very first web pages, we didn’t update from our own computers — we did it from Internet cafes and did it quickly and then left quickly.

“We were anonymous — we didn’t have a name. We were holding our meetings in secret.”

Their protest turned to a search for solutions and the idea of a commercial organization whose members refuse to pay pizzo, and publicly declare it as a mark of good business, was born.

Acceptance was slow. And no wonder: Most everyone in Palermo knew what happened to a local clothing manufacturer named Libero Grassi when he refused to pay pizzo in 1991.

Mr. Grassi wrote an open letter of refusal, published in the island’s largest newspaper. It began: “Dear extortionist.”

The community, however, did not rally around him; customers and employees were nervous; competitors critical and police perplexed.

Soon after, his factory was broken into and the only thing stolen was the exact amount of money the mob had previously demanded. A few months after that, Mr. Grassi was shot dead in the street. His widow, Pina Grassi, blamed his murder not just on the Mafia but on the silence of the business community, indifference of the citizens and absence of the state.

Feeling Mrs. Grassi could be trusted not to be in league with the Mafia, Addiopizzo asked her to head a committee to vet membership. The problem was, there were no applicants to assess.

“We didn’t have any requests. We had to go out and look for people. They were uncertain, frightened,” says Mr. Zaffuto.

Most of the first members were, like Mrs. Grassi, those who had already been savaged by the mob, including the brother of murdered anti-Mafia activist Peppino Impastato and the pharmacy owned by the family of Paolo Borsellino, the slain anti-Mafia prosecutor.

It was meant as a message to the town that it is not possible to refuse to pay

To give mainstream business a nudge, in 2005, the group published the names of 3,500 consumers pledging to support Mafia-free shops. The following year, the campaign officially began when it released the names of the first 100 business members.

Addiopizzo’s big test came quickly.

Rodolfo Guajana, owner of a hardware wholesale company, was one of those early members and he had refused to pay pizzo to mob boss Salvatore Lo Piccolo. He suffered warning vandalism. Then, in 2007, someone cut a hole in the roof of his warehouse, poured in gasoline and torched it.

“It was meant as a message to the town that it is not possible to refuse to pay,” says Mr. Zaffuto.

“It was the most critical point for Addiopizzo because for a year we had been saying that if we stay together, the Mafia cannot attack us. But they tried to show that they could attack whomever they wanted.”

A mobster doesn’t destroy a business when he wants a victim to pay, only when he knows a victim will never pay. The victim is then sacrificed as a warning to others.

If Mr. Guajana’s story ended like Mr. Grassi’s, Addiopizzo would be dead.

This time, encouraged by Addiopizzo, the community sent a message of its own. Collections were taken to help Mr. Guajana, crowds came to show he wasn’t alone, and trade associations stood by him. Local government found him an even larger warehouse as a replacement. And, significantly, Lo Piccolo and his henchmen were arrested and imprisoned.

Rather than the end of Addiopizzo, it was its confirmation.

Last year, the organization accepted its 1,000th business member to display its orange logo.

As well as drawing customers, the logos actually repel voracious mobsters, says Mr. Ferrara, the prosecutor.

“Many investigations demonstrated that the so-called ‘men of honour’ tend to avoid committing extortions and similar crimes against members and associates of this kind of association,” he says.

Mr. Ferrara has listened to police wiretaps and heard mafiosi ordering their men to not hit an Addiopizzo store because they are sure they will not be paid and they fear being arrested.

It is a remarkable change in Palermo, where even powerful and protected people who crossed the Mafia were brutally and publicly murdered.

Addiopizzo itself is evolving.

From its anonymous, secret meetings, it now as its own offices — a spacious downtown pad with the most perfect history.

As Mr. Zaffuto reminisces, he leans back on a couch sipping espresso behind heavy, wooden doors and up a curving staircase, knowing this office was once a condominium owned by Tomasso “Masino” Spadaro, the local Mafia boss. Spadaro had made millions smuggling cigarettes and extorting pizzo from neighbourhood shops.

Under Italy’s laws, property of convicted mobsters is seized and can be turned over to groups and organizations to benefit the community. Confiscated property includes farms that now produce Mafia-free wine, bread and produce; villas that have been turned into hotels and restaurants; and many other businesses.

To link them, Addiopizzo recently started Addiopizzo Travel, a side business that runs Mafia-free trips for tourists.

All of it suggests a significant shift in the balance of power in the state’s war with the Mafia.

Grassroots opposition to the mob, says Mr. Ferrara, the prosecutor, is bringing “real change of mind and of behaviour in many people, pushing them to cooperate as never happened in the past.”

The Mafia has not found a response. At the bustling Antica, Mr. Conticello’s restaurant thrives, serving his ancestors’ recipes to more mouths than ever before.

When Addiopizzo moved into the mobster’s old condo to renovate it as their offices, volunteers found a secret exit in a back room. Although tempted to leave it, they sealed it over.